Typically, enterprise software systems such as Human Resource management (HR), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and Electronic Commerce (EC), include business management software, such as catalog functions, for managing a database. These enterprise software systems are typically installed and used at companies in many different industries, each of which having unique requirements. These heterogeneous requirements for enterprise systems creates a dilemma from a product development viewpoint, since it would be too bulky and complex to design business management software to accommodate all the various requirements for enterprise systems. On the other hand, a product should have a degree of flexibility to cover a minimal set of common requirements. In the end, a balance is made between the actual features that are shipped with the product releases and the anticipated industry/company-specific customization. One rule of thumb is that for large enterprise software, the cost to customize is three to five times larger than the cost to license a product. This high customization expense has prevented small and medium-sized business from aggressively adopting modern business management software.
The catalog function is one of the software components of an enterprise application that is most commonly customized to meet different needs. For example, with commerce applications in the retail industry, a media chain store may sell CDs and video, wherein the most important catalog data content includes singers, song lists, directors, producers, etc. In contrast, an office supply company may sells pens, pencils, folders, and other common office supplied, wherein the common catalog content concentrates on color, material and manufacturer, for example. The access and storage of information regarding singers, song lists, color and material is quite different. It is thus conceivably difficult to design a catalog to efficiently handle content related to CDs, video, pens, pencils, folders, as well as the millions of other products in retail and other industries.
One reason for the constant struggle between catalog uniformity and product heterogeneity is due to the rigidity of traditional product catalog design. This is evidenced from a number of publications on electronic catalog as well as from the present inventor's experience with electronic commerce server development. The variations of schema design described, for example, in the article by S. Danish, “Building database-driven electronic catalogs,” SIGMOD Record, Vol. 27, No. 4, December 1998, and in A. Jhingran, “Anatomy of a real E-commerce system,” ACM SIGMOD Proceedings, May 2000) are common choices. But, these techniques and other conventional systems do not adapt well to product heterogeneity.